Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection of Gloria Kupchenko Frolick and Stanley Frolick;
By descent to their daughter;
By descent to her son, Private Collection, Toronto

Note:

Alexis Gritchenko was a Ukrainian born painter, graphic artist and art historian who travelled extensively throughout Europe, Asia and North America. He participated in exhibitions from 1909. Gritchenko's work can be found in various museums and private collections, more than three hundred of them in the United States and Canada. The Alexis Gritchenko Foundation was formed in New York in 1958 to preserve Gritchenko's artistic legacy.

A clashing of figuration and abstraction, this painting depicts the real world but the viewer is ever conscious of the paint and lines applied to the flat surface. Gritchenko has locked his image into a frenzied throng of shape and colour that paradoxically seems to heave and swell before becoming immutable. The curves and bends of the land in the foreground are echoed in the radiant sea. Scores of vertically stressed brushstrokes play off the clear horizontals of the thirdly divided image. In this energetic painting, readability evaporates in favour of an eruption of colour. One can sense the laborious effort the artist underwent to broker a resolution between the two-dimensional and tangible world.